Philippe Jaccottet: L'Évidence du simple et l'éclat de l'obscur (review)

This lavish, ernormously knowledgeable book is a weath of judicious insights into Jaccottet's oeuvre and postwar French poetry generally. It draws from a wide range of sources, including interviews with Jaccottet and his correspondance. The style, however, is often more celebratory and allusive than strictly analytical, making the book better suited for readers already familiar with Jaccottet than for undergraduate students. Those keen to refresh their appreciation of the poet, and unfazed by 547 pages of flourished, in parts somewhat profuse, French, may enjoy Jean-Claude Mathieu's prose. As an academic work, this book could be more user-friendly. Like many French books, it lacks a critical bibliography and an index, which is all the more problematic with a book of this size. In the table of contents, the only clue to the first 150 pages is this fragment: 'Un petit roseau m'a suffi . . .'. Poems are rarely quoted in full. Referencing can be erratic: in some cases only the author's name is given: Rilke (p. 50) and Bataille (p. 448), for example. The first 150 pages retrace the poet's trajectory across the span of over forty publications since 1944, connecting the thematic and formal fluctuations to biographical turning points. The rest falls into three parts and fifteen chapters, but these fail to structure clear argumentative progress. Rather, Mathieu works out thematic approaches to Jaccottet's poetry through mazes of quotations and countless erudite parallels, from Dante to the German Romantics and Mallarmé. The emerging themes revolve around Jaccottet's poetic quest for 'l'insaisissable', or what the wandering subject gleans of the real as he walks through it —elusive, elemental impressions of the wind, light, colours, scents, the shifting seasons, the presence of death in the everyday. All are tentative glimpses at a presence which springs from the subject's underlying awareness of an absence: that of a harmonising principle to the world. The poet may risk 'une réponse, à partir du manquemême' (p. 40). Yet to reveal the fragmentary, ephemeral manifestations of the real, the poet needs to vanish (p. 478), to become 'ignorant'. His task is merely to distil the words conveyed by the bare landscapes of Grignan (p. 260). Jaccottet's poetic asceticism makes him aspire to an impersonal voice, free of elevated diction or metaphorical departures. Notes and haikus, however chiselled, are most apt to recapture what is fleeting and immediate. Yet words, 'longeant cet inconnu' (p. 301), inevitably fail to grasp it: Jaccottet's poetry is haunted by this unresolved tension (p. 435). This central conflict appears more saliently in another monograph on the poet: Philippe Jaccottet, le pari de l'inactuel by Hervé Ferrage, which was published in the same month as the Mathieu. Leaner, more focused and accessible, Ferrage's book is a useful complement to it. More recently, Emma Wagstaff has developed analyses touched on by Mathieu, namely Jaccottet's 'floating images', his work as translator and his rapport to language and its failings: see Provisionality and the Poem: Transition in the Work of du Bouchet, Jaccottet and Noël (Rodopi, 2006).